The Curious, Crumbling Cult of Elon Musk

I appreciate the hell out of science. Without it, we wouldn’t have a polio vaccine OR the Nintendo Power Glove. Science is the enemy of Donald Trump, and Republicans in general, and being an enemy of Donald Trump is almost invariably a huge positive in my book. But I am not good at science. I also do not understand science, just as I do not understand math. 

So while I love everything that science gives us, I am not part of the “Yay, Science!” crowd and I’ve never understood the cult of either Neil deGrasse Tyson or Elon Musk. Then again, I only ever read about either man when they do something incredibly stupid, or obnoxious, or attention-grabbing in a petty, juvenile fashion. 

So I end up reading about both men on a pretty regular basis. Yes, it seems like Tyson and Musk are always doing something stupidly provocative or provocatively stupid, but in the heated race to determine which superstar of science is a more ridiculous and embarrassing human being, Elon Musk is enjoying a sizable lead. 

The Tesla billionaire stopped by 100 million man Joe Rogan’s studio in 2018 and smoked a fat blunt during a podcast recording in an image that instantly went viral and made it impossible not to enjoy a good, long laugh at Musk’s expense. 

At the risk of being hyperbolic, no one in the history of the universe has ever looked as ridiculous using drugs as Musk did smoking that blunt. Oh, but looking at those pictures makes me laugh and laugh and laugh! 

To me, Elon Musk is what an excitable ten year old boy imagines a billionaire to be: a guy who looks like a Bond villain with a name to match who makes electric cars that go vroom, vroom, vroom without gas or nothing and then has a baby with a pretty famous singer lady he gives a name no one can pronounce and then he builds a rocket to go to outer space but also to make a movie with Tom Cruise with as well. 

Musk is like Donald Trump in that respect. But he’s like Donald Trump in a disconcerting number of other ways as well. He is, like Trump, a consummate showman and self-promoter addicted to attention and validation. And, like Trump he uses a Twitter account that should have been wrestled away from him for his own good to communicate with the public, his public, without the filter of a public relations consultant to help protect him from himself. 

Musk has tweeted about being a billionaire socialist and Marx being a capitalist although those posts seem to be a muddled attempt at irony rather than an even more muddled attempt at politics. 

On March 19th, Musk tweeted “Based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in US too by end of April.”  On April 29th he tweeted “FREE AMERICA NOW”, a decidedly Trumpian sentiment, right down to its use of all caps and the unmistakable sense that it very well could be the product of either a manic episode, an Adderall jag or some combination of the two. 

Musk’s Twitter feed hit a new low recently when he tweeted on May 17th, “Take the red pill.” It was seemingly a reference to the right-wing, MRA-endorsed concept of being “redpilled”, or having an epiphany about how feminists brainwash unthinking men into seeing men as oppressors when they’re really blameless victims of the true oppressors: women, POC and the LGTBQ community 

Ivanka Trump responded giddily with, “Taken!” which seems curious to me given the explicitly misogynistic nature of “redpill” ideology but makes sense given Trump’s cynical and unconvincing perversion and cooption of feminism. 

The concept of Redpill comes from The Matrix and its trans creators the Wachowskis, causing Lili Wachowski to respond to Musk and Trump’s tweets with a succinct, pointed “fuck both of you.” 

Musk’s red pill tweet seems inspired by his own experiences with government oversight in the era of COVID-19. Having consistently underestimated the threat COVID-19 posed, he’s now one of any number of businessmen eager for the country to be re-opened immediately, consequences be damned. 

Musk’s own “Redpill” moment seems to have occurred once he realized that if the government wanted him and his company to behave responsibility and minimize risk for its employees even if it meant hurting profits then obviously the government must be evil enemies of freedom.

It didn’t take much for Musk to go from hero to villain, from babyface to hell, but I’m not exactly certainly what made him a good guy or a hero in the first place, beyond having a lot of money and being famous, of course. 

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